The EU’s Horizon 2020 Research project PROMOTioN focuses on the development of meshed offshore HVDC grids. Meshed HVDC grids are not a mature technology yet and the right tools have to be used in order to analyze the behaviour of the combined AC and meshed HVDC system under normal and emergency operating conditions. For this reason several functionalities have been included in a prototype version of Smart Flow:

• Modelling of voltage droop characteristics of HVDC converters
• Include DC equipment contingency in the Security Analysis
• Improvement of the Tabular Output to include variables of the HVDC grid
• Possibility to include dynamic modelling of DC lines

Several improvements in our OPF module IPSO are also ongoing in order to be able to perform hybrid AC/DC OPF.

Smart Flow and Eurostag has been intensively used in the PROMOTioN project for the following applications:

• Load flow and Security Analysis
• Dynamic simulations of the converter controls and comparison with EMT simulations

The first application aimed at verifying the technical viability of HVDC grids proposed by a dedicated Optimum Transmission Expansion Planning algorithm.

While the second application allowed to verify the adequacy of the Eurostag tool for performing dynamic simulations of large meshed HVDC grids and contingencies.